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picked up this book, "Emperor of Ocean Park", for a quarter at a library sale today. the author is African-American. Never heard of him before - anybody know him or this book?
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
Yes I read it when it just came out. The Today show wanted to copy Oprahs success with her book club so they started their own and his was the first book they chose. It was on the bestseller list during that time. -
Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
What did you think of the book, seemiyah?
I'm liking it a lot, although I'm finding it a slow read - meaning that the story is so complex and the author's viewpoint is so layered with meaning that to fully appreciate it all, I have to read it slowly. I'm only on page 131 of the 650+ pages of small type, after three days (which is really slow for me!)
I'm putting a lot of trust in this book that it is truthfully describing upper middle class African American life, which is something not usually portrayed in popular media. Someone yesterday, in the post about Coretta Scott King's death, asked which educated woman today would sacrifice her own career to put her husband's first, like Coretta did, and this book seems to answer the question - it is still being done by black women.
Very intriguing book. Interesting that the protagonists wife, a beautiful, ambitious and possibly faithless woman, is of Jamaican heritage. I hope more of that info comes out in the book.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
Its been a while since I read it but I remember liking it enough to buy it as a gift for someone. I do remember that it was a slow read but not boring, the person I bought it for is still reading it and tells me the same thing but that they are enjoying it.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
yes. one of the things i'm finding amusing about it is the author's use of "darker nation" and "paler nation" as racial euphemisms. i suppose any novel that explores so many layers of race relations would be forced into finding different ways of talking about and referring to race.
Here's a really cynical excerpt that had me laughing quietly to myself:
"From the middle of the stack, I pull out the new Harvard Law Review, skim the table of contents, then drop it, fast, after coming across yet another scholarly article explaining why my infamous father is a traitor to his race, for that is the level to which the darker nation has been reduced: being unable to influence the course of a single event in white America, we waste our precious time and intellectual energy maligning each other, as though we best serve the cause of racial progress by kicking other black folks around."
[img]/forums/images/graemlins/eek.gif[/img] what i want to know is: how much of this viewpoint from the character reflects the author's own opinion?Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
I went on the website for the book and it has an interview with him, here is one of the questions they asked:
Q: Did you intentionally set out to explore the issue of race in this novel?
A: I don't think it is possible to write a realistic story about the black experience in America without race—and racism, real or suspected—being a part of that story. There was no need to invent situations in which to explore the problem; once the characters and settings were developed, the tensions that would inevitably arise seemed to me to be obvious.
At the same time, I do not think Emperor is a novel that is mostly about race, and I do not for a moment want any reader to think I see race as a constraint on either the freedom of the characters or my own freedom to create a world for them to live in. I am less interested in how racism influences their lives than how their own strengths and weaknesses do.
You can read the rest of the interview HereComment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
That was a great interview, seemiyah! [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70409-waytogo.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70371-jump.gif[/img] thanks for posting.
It's interesting to see that the author is a believing Christian, and to see his views about belief in a higher power as it influence's a person's development, and also his thoughts on the importance of family versus career:
Q: This novel has many relationships—familial, marital, and professional—that are destroyed by ambition. Is this novel in some ways a cautionary tale?
A: Definitely. Ambition lies near the heart of the individualism that can be so destructive to the solid values of family and community that make a nation great. All of us have seen people and families sacrificed for the sake of someone else's career.
Yet I am also interested in the virtues that might enable us to withstand the tug of constant advancement. The one who dies with the most toys doesn't really win, and neither does the one who dies with the best resume. The one who has the strongest relationships with family and friends probably doesn't win, either (because life shouldn't be about winning), but, as I hope the novel makes clear, he or she does have a more successful life. And the virtue of faith—of following God, of recognizing our obligations to a source higher than our own will—seems to me the most powerful antidote to the pressure to build resume points.
i'm about halfway through the book now, and getting gripped by the mystery.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
i've finished reading this book. it is a very satisfying book, although there is a sense that the story is unfinished. i'm not surprised the author plans a follow-up work with some of the same characters.
The heartbreak the main character, law professor Misha/Tal Garland endures in this book feels very real. But I would wonder how a black man who read this book would identify with Tal's insecurities, and the way it is played out in his relationship with his gorgeous and ambitious wife, Kimmer, and his relationships with his peers. How many black men would be so careful of minding his own career and life so that it does not interfere with his wife's ambitions? Or is this something that is class-based as an experience?
The mystery in this book is also nicely resolved. it was built up so greatly, i was in fear that the ultimate revelation of what Tal's dead father's cryptic messages meant would fail to live up to expectations. But it did not.
I would recommend this book to readers. It's intelligent and conscious and real at the same time.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
BTW - mark a couple passages caw dem remine me of discussions and/or ppl on the board. lickle later mi poas dem.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
Talcott used to go out with Lindy, but fell for her married-sister Kimmer. To the shame of both families, Tal and Kimmer started an adulterous affair. Eventually, Kimmer got divorced and married Tal, and they had a son named Bentley, whose birth brought some forgiveness from Tal's inlaws, who, incidentally, are Jamaican.
I thought of Tropicana when I read this passage:
Then my in-laws grow effusive as they ask about the marvellous Bentley, for Lindy, the darling of the Gold Coast in her youth, made a single bad marriage and has yet to give them any grandchildren.
Now she is just another unmarried black woman in her forties hoping for lightning to strike, a pattern all too common in the darker nation as intermarriage, violence, prison, drugs, and disease combine to decimate the pool of eligible males.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
I thought of Professor Fledgist when I read the following rant by Talcott. I miss Fledgist, and wish he would return to Jcans.com.
The following Tuesday, twelve days after the death of my father, I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues – leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on the The Challenge of Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term – all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of who, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally round them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.
Or maybe I’m just measuring their prospects by my own.Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
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picked up this book, "Emperor of Ocean Park", for a quarter at a library sale today. the author is African-American. Never heard of him before - anybody know him or this book?
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read this book wen it fuss come out...wish there was a copy of wat i wrote wen i mentioned it on here....i will look fi di book an give it a quick look because there was something about it i did not like....i don't want to confuse it wid any others, but is this the one whose father is murdered and he goes home....is there a two son conflict in the story...i have the book somewhere in mi bedroom ...mek mi look fi it tomorra an see....it is a big book if i remember rightlyComment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
yes, i'd love to hear your thoughts on this book, vannie, espeically if you did not like it. here's a passage that recalled to me a recent interaction we had:
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Meanwhile, the preacher’s pocked face arranges itself into a smile of reminiscence. “This was back in the fifties, of course, a time when philosophers, even atheist philosophers, were expected to know their Bible. After all, the Bible has been by far the most influential book in Western history, praise God, probably in the history of the whole world. Well, how can anybody pretend to understand or to explain that world without understanding the book that built it? But when you come to know the Bible, you come to know God. So the atheist who has truly tried to understand the world will already be closer to God than many Christians, because he will know God’s word. The Lord creates many paths to his house, and he will, in the fullness of time, gather in even many of those who believe that they do not believe; for, in struggling with God, they are halfway to belief already.”Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
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yes, i'd love to hear your thoughts on this book, vannie, espeically if you did not like it. here's a passage that recalled to me a recent interaction we had:
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Meanwhile, the preacher’s pocked face arranges itself into a smile of reminiscence. “This was back in the fifties, of course, a time when philosophers, even atheist philosophers, were expected to know their Bible. After all, the Bible has been by far the most influential book in Western history, praise God, probably in the history of the whole world. Well, how can anybody pretend to understand or to explain that world without understanding the book that built it? But when you come to know the Bible, you come to know God. So the atheist who has truly tried to understand the world will already be closer to God than many Christians, because he will know God’s word. The Lord creates many paths to his house, and he will, in the fullness of time, gather in even many of those who believe that they do not believe; for, in struggling with God, they are halfway to belief already.”
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now mi really a go haffi look fi di book....mi ago look tonite afta di show....Bob Marley show tonite fi mek di people dem dung yah dance likkle reggae....dis is why mi no like di music ting u know...mi too ole fi dem yah late nite....but tru mi bruk an JKid won't married me, mi haffi a hustle [img]/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]Comment
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Re: Emperor of Ocean Park: Stephen L. Carter
so MG i took the down time of the bad weather to reread the book....was still impressed with the subject matter but not too convinced with the language taken by the author...for the most part, i feel he makes some really profound remarks about race relations in this country....and he gets it right also...both inter racial and intraracial...dead on....however, i found his choice of language to be laboriously concious of an effort to reflect a tome authored by a black.....along the lines of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker....too conscious of the adjectival description afforded learned blacks, eloquent,so they keep this high brow language even when it is not necessary...u know how we have learned to appreciate the Shakespeare but still can read the Ms Lou...well he just stays on the Shakespeare even wen a likkle Ms Lou is needed
if u want to choose a day to discuss the book further, i am up for it ...let me knowComment
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